zoogenesis Thinking animals, encounter, and other stuff June 19, 2012 On the importance of Heidegger’s anthropogenesis, and of moving beyond it By Richard Iveson The following is a copy of the paper I presented at the Unruly Creatures, 2: Creative Revolutions conference at the Natural History Museum yesterday. It was a great event and, if the main papers (by Andre Dias, Erica Fudge, Jonathan Burt & Anat Pick) are posted as a podcast, they are well worth catching. My own paper, which was put together at short notice, is largely drawn from my “Animals in Looking-Glass World” article and, in a sense, serves as an introduction to that paper, which explores in detail the implications of thinking “language” beyond its traditional reduction to the human. . * * * Here I want to talk about the originality and importance of Martin Heidegger’s notion of anthropogenesis which, once it is stripped of its remaining humanist-metaphysical trappings, paradoxically offers much for thinking with other animals. In a series of lectures from 1929-1930 entitled The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, Heidegger argues that nonhuman animals are excluded from the world as a necessary result of their essential “captivation” within an environment. Put simply, and in contrast to the human, for the animal there can be neither anything beyond, nor any differentiation within, the ring which marks the absolute limit of her environmental capture. She is trapped, completely absorbed and dissolved within her specific environment, essentially unable to perceive herself as a separate being. As a result, an animal can therefore never “have” her own captivation, can never apprehend her own capture, and is thus, Heidegger concludes, “poor-in-world.” Despite the time spent considering “the essence of animality,” it soon becomes clear, however, that Heidegger is only interested in animals to the extent that they might serve as the scenery against which the essence of the human can be thereafter revealed. In this way, says Heidegger, we come to recognise that only the human exists in a world rather than an environment because only the human is able to apprehend or “have” her own captivation. Hidden in this apparently simple gesture, however, is the award of ontological difference to human animals alone – a gesture with devastating About these ads (http://wordpress.com/about-these-ads/)